A useful, relevant history of a “relentlessly tempestuous” city.
Pertinent, patient study of the tumultuous history of this strategic city since its founding in 762.
British foreign correspondent Marozzi (The Way of Herodotus: Travels with the Man Who Invented History, 2008, etc.) has experience living in the “slaughterhouse” that Baghdad has become since the mid-2000s. In fact, sectarian violence has plagued the city since its creation as the new capital by the victorious Abbasid caliph al-Mansur. Eclipsing the Sunni Islam capital at Damascus and sending the Umayyad dynasty into exile, the new Shia-based Abbasid leaders chose the ancient Mesopotamian site between the Tigris and Euphrates for its central location and fertile land. The city’s name might be from Persian, meaning “founded by God,” yet Mansur preferred the name Dar as Salam, or “house of peace,” which would prove heavily ironic even for the murderous Mansur, who had a storehouse of corpses of his enemies. Originally constructed as a walled, round city, it soon expanded across the Tigris. Following Mansur’s death in 775, Baghdad would endure nearly 40 Abbasid caliphs, many enjoying splendid building projects and cultural efflorescence—e.g., the prosperous reign of Harun al-Rashid, immortalized in A Thousand and One Nights. The Mongol raids descended on the city from the mid-1200s onward, followed by Persia in 1508 and the Ottomans in 1528, who would remain until 1917. Yet despite the turbulence and frequent destruction, Baghdad remained a “bustling emporium,” with a thriving Jewish population as well. Marozzi has sifted through the numerous tales of travelers throughout the centuries, and he also makes use of the rich British accounts, which saw the city’s opening to outsiders by the mid-1800s. Indeed, the British introduced a succession of colorful characters—e.g., Sir Stanley Maude, who wrested the city from the Turks, and Gertrude Bell, champion of modern Iraq and preserver of its antiquities.
A useful, relevant history of a “relentlessly tempestuous” city.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0306823985
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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